I have an account - My Photoshelter Account, and am thinking about next year - so far I haven't had much business there. I have 3 stock agents, and actively market my work, and thought that Photoshelter would be a way to sell some images directly - without giving away 50% of the sale, but so far I don't think it's paid for its self.

I have a traditional website, www.klassphoto.com, so I have a place to put my images / announcements etc., but I currently don't offer online sale, as a merchant account is very expensive.

I was wondering if people are using photoshelter, and what everyone's thoughts on the topic are.

I recently started using it and have my account fully integrated with my normal site, www.moosephoto.com. I really like how it works for ease of adding images and many other attributes like that. I too have sold nothing over it so far, but perhaps three weeks time is too early to be fair.

I am glad to see some members talking about PhotoShelter as I'm considering signing up for it. I love the feature which allows editors to buy stock directly using Fotoquote which I use already. I have gone through some of the tutorials and they have great info for helping you get set up and so many features! Now whether is sells work or not, I don't know. They are supposed to have good marketing to the site...

I saw that Art Wolfe's site has a link with PhotoShelter (running his stock sales as mentioned above) AND Livebooks where I believe his website was created. There were other big names using PhotoShelter. I wonder if one of them or their stock photo staff would reply to how they feel about PhotoShelter and whether it was worth it or not...

Yes, I saw that Art Wolfe and others are on Photoshelter. The only caveat here is that Art Wolfe doesn't need Photoshelter's name to sell his images - I would imagine that he can attract a fair amount of buyers all on his own. Photoshelter may work for him, in that it simplifies delivery and pricing of online images, but I need to Photoshelter to attract buyers - I don't have the archive that Art Wolfe does, so I'm not able to tell publications I have diverse enough coverage to be my own stock agency.

I would agree that Photoshelter's setup and gallery creation is easy for those who don't have much experience creating websites - and certainly no programming knowledge is necessary. I think it works best as a portfolio site - and if you have a core group of editors that frequent your work, then you might be able to make things more convenient for them by providing online sales - with direct delivery. I haven't seen any new people browsing in Photoshelter - my hope, and maybe this was unrealistic, was that Photoshelter would be a place where new clients would find my work.

I get a decent amount of traffic on my PhotoShelter site and it's pretty easy to tell what kind of traffic you're getting. While on the trip I was just for the summit and the shooting I did afterward my PhotoShelter site was involved in a sale. My name was given to a travel magazine by the local wildlife refuge in connection with a butterfly photo they needed for a story about the refuge. (Critically endangered butterfly, largest population is on this refuge.) They contacted me, I sent them the link to the appropriate gallery on my PhotoShelter site, and they recontacted me to seal the deal. They didn't buy through the PhotoShelter e-commerce, but...